Box Kubernetes Migration with Sam Ghods

Over 12 years of engineering, Box has developed a complex architecture of services. Whenever a user uploads a file to Box, that upload might cause 5 or 6 different services to react to the event. Each of these services is managed by a set of servers, and managing all of these different servers is a...

Over 12 years of engineering, Box has developed a complex architecture of services. Whenever a user uploads a file to Box, that upload might cause 5 or 6 different services to react to the event. Each of these services is managed by a set of servers, and managing all of these different servers is a challenge.

Sam Ghods is the cofounder and services architect of Box. In 2014, Sam was surveying the landscape of different resource managers, deciding which tool should be the underlying scheduler for deploying services at Box. He chose Kubernetes because it was based on Google’s internal Borg scheduling system.

For years, engineering teams at companies like Facebook and Twitter had built internal scheduling systems modeled after Borg. When Kubernetes arrived, it provided an out-of-the-box tool for managing infrastructure like Google would.

In today’s episode, Sam describes how Box began its migration to Kubernetes, and what the company has learned along the way. It’s a great case study for people who are looking at migrating their own systems to Kubernetes.

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